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Notes Don is a University of Florida grad, Bachelors and MBA Don is CTO of AspirEDU, educational analytics company Don is Managing Member of Construction Specialties a Design, a commercial maintenance firm Randy was a CTO for Horizon Cash Management Randy worked as a hands-on developer Randy was a CTO for Innovations for Learning Randy is founder of All Aboard Apps, a consultancy Randy is the creator of HOA Done, a startup Links AspirEDU All Aboard Apps HOA Done ClosingThanks for listening to the CTO Think Podcast. If you liked what you heard, please share a link to the podcast with your friends.Reviews on iTunes are always appreciated and help us spread the word about the podcast.Show music is Dumpster Dive by Marc Walloch, licensed by PremiumBeat.comShownotes and previous episodes can be found on our website at www.ctothink.comFor questions, comments, or things you'd like to hear on future shows, please email us at hello@ctothink.comFor notifications of future episodes, please sign up to the CTO Think newsletter on www.ctothink.comWe'll keep talking next week!TranscriptDon VanDemark: Welcome to CTO Think, a podcast about leadership, product development, and technology decisions by two recovering chief technology officers. I'm Don VanDemark.Randy Burgess: And I'm Randy Burgess. Don, tell us about yourself.Don VanDemark: Went and got my bachelor's of computer science and my MBA from University of Florida. Spent 17 years in enterprise programming and management, places like IBM and have also worked at 5 different small businesses. A nice variety of experiences there. My current roles as I'm currently the chief technology officer for AspirEdu, an educational analytics company and I'm a managing member of Construction Specialties and Design, a commercial maintenance firm where I've been working with them to bring them up to speed using the latest technologies. That's one of the current projects I'm doing with them and with AspirEdu we're continuing to grow our product base and entering that phrase of refactoring. Randy what about you?Randy Burgess: Let's see. Started hacking on computers as a kid, but really didn't get into technology until I got out of college. First real technology job was actually my first CTO job where I was CTO for 10 years for a small finance firm. Along the way I decided to work on side projects to actually learn how to code, [inaudible 00:01:47] hands on type of stuff. Once I got out of that, I worked for a number of companies in a non-CTO role just as a developer and then was CTO for a non-profit called Innovations for Learning for a couple years. Right now, I'm running a consultancy that is helping startups build their NVP new apps and I'm working on a product called HOA Done and working to move that to a launch in the near future. Don, what do you think folks can expect to get out of this podcast?Don VanDemark: We can offer a few things. The vast experience we have allows us to talk about how technology affects different industries, we can talk about various technology decisions like hiring and product development, and choices like that. What do you feel Randy?Randy Burgess: Well I listen to a lot of podcasts that other people put out there and the main reason I listen is that I can learn where other people are screwing things up or finding out the best ways to get things done. So I'm hoping that we can similarly share with people where we were ignorant or stupid or learning our way and you know provide some experience for, it might be a CEO that's looking to hire their first CTO, it might be someone that's new to the CTO role or it might be kind of like I've been at times, a CTO with no one to bounce ideas off of. And you know hopefully our discussions and some of the people we may bring on can just give some insight out there to folks in a technology leadership type of role.Don VanDemark: That sounds great. I look forward to putting content together that people can listen to and hopefully learn from and I like how you used the past tense of our mistakes not implying that we have any future mistakes to come. So thank you Randy.Randy Burgess: All right. We'll talk next week.Thanks for listening to the CTO Think podcast. If you liked what you heard, please share a link to the podcast with your friends. Show music is Dumpster Dive by Mark Walloch, licensed by Premium Beat.com. Show notes and previous episodes can be found on our website at CTOthink.com. For questions, comments, or things you'd like to hear on future shows, please email us at advice@ctothink.com. For notifications of future episodes, please sign up to the CTO Think newsletter also on our website. We'll keep talking next week.